Downtown Book Ladies

Labor Day is over, everybody's back from the Cape and the Continent, and the fall club-and-social season has resumed. Tonight was the monthly meeting of the Springfield, Massachusetts Downtown Book Ladies Club, on hiatus since last spring.

To be in this club, you have to be female, live downtown or be the sister of someone living downtown, and like to read. Currently, there are seven of us. We meet monthly, and take turns hosting in our homes. In this photo, Anna, Kathy and Maggie are holding up their books to prove that this meeting was not just about white wine, cheese, caperberries, grapes, chocolate decadence, and neighborhood gossip.

We don't have a facilitator, but take some individual responsibility for leading the discussion if it's the book we've chosen. This season, our theme is art and architecture. Everyone has proferred suggestions so far except me. Choosing a book on that theme, under 250 pages and gettable in sufficient quantity through local libraries or bookstores, has so far proved beyond me.

Tonight we discussed Witold Rybczynski's The Most Beautiful House in the World, the charming account by a noted architect of his construction of a boatbuilding shed. Talk about process! He takes years to sketch and dream about it, eventually laying a foundation and finally, finally, actually putting up a building. By the time he's got it up, he's realized that he wants to live in it, and so it becomes a home instead. He never does build the boat.

If that's not a metaphor for my own life, I don't know what is.